by Mattias Berg
I also told her that I could still remember how the plane lurched, and that special metallic click when the Bomb was released, and how the sky was then covered by the mushroom cloud. When the pillar of smoke eventually sank away we could see that the place where the city had turned into a black, formless mass, like a cauldron filled with boiling tar. A sight nobody had prepared us for.
The very old doctor sat totally still as I told her this, like a beautiful statue. Then she nodded and continued with her story. Said that it had been an unusually beautiful morning in the city below our aircraft, that she was lying out in the yard dressed only in her underwear, more or less knocked out after a long shift at the hospital. “One always recalls irrelevant details like that,” she said, “with such precision.” She had, for example, wondered if it really could be a spark from a passing tram which suddenly lit up that ornamental stone lantern with such magical light. An instant later all shadows in the yard vanished. The sun, which had been shining so strongly just a moment ago, could no longer be distinguished against the sharp white glare of the whole sky.
Gradually she became more and more consumed by her account, started to spin around on her stainless-steel stool, wave her arms about. Tried to convey how the air had been filled with smoke and dust in the same instant, that the only thing which she could see of their old house was a lone beam sticking up crooked and twisted from the ground a little way off. When she then looked down at her own body she saw that she was naked. Being a scientist, she began—“funnily enough,” as she now expressed it—to muse over where her underwear might have gone, how it could have vanished without she herself being at all damaged. Then she felt her face and realized that her mouth was just an open hole. That her lower lip was hanging down in a long flap and a five-inch shard of glass was poking out of her shoulder.
With the same peculiar absent feeling, as if she had seen all this in a movie, she called out for her husband and children. After hearing no answer from them, she took her place in the long lines which led to the hospital, as if sleep-walking. Many were walking with their arms sticking out strangely from their bodies, making them look like human scarecrows, which also puzzled the medical student in her. Until she understood that they held them like that to avoid touching their own burned bodies.
But the most striking thing, she recounted, was how they had all walked along in silence. How nobody screamed in pain and anguish or yelled out for their lost lives. Just this ghostly, deathly silence—from that moment on, ever since.
I said to the very old doctor that I still regarded the Bomb with a certain relief, since it had in my opinion ended the war and in that way saved many hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives, both American and Japanese. That I would soon be closing my eyes for ever certain that what we did was merciful.
She nodded again, otherwise as still as before. Then she got up and walked to my bunk. Kneeled, kissed my forehead lightly, said that she forgave me. That she had already forgiven us all.
At that I took hold of her head—so very like Amba’s: even the shape of her skull—and smashed it against the bedhead. It split at once, spilled out over my pillow and bed linen. Like a soft-boiled egg.
5.05
At midnight we landed at Dulles, after circling for fifteen minutes before being given permission to descend. Edelweiss no doubt wanted to demonstrate his power. That he held everything in his hand. Our escort appeared just to the right of the line for passport and visa control: on his sign it said “MR KERN” in handwritten capital letters. As if we were just any business group.
And it all seemed illusory. Edelweiss had his operatives among both the personnel and passengers. In front of us and behind us, shoes and clothes had to be removed, demeaning rituals behind half-closed curtains, people taken aside for regulation body searches. But we did not even have to place our enormous luggage on the conveyor belt. Because we had made a pact with the grand master, the very inventor of the concept of “war games”.
While Ingrid and Jesús María then went to the women’s restroom together, to assume their new looks, I walked up to the man with the sign. His appearance was familiar even though I could no longer recall his name. There were so many, after all, so interchangeable. And this one was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His age suggested that he belonged to the ranks of the unpromotable, but he was probably perfectly suited for this assignment. Sufficiently skilled not to mess it up. Sufficiently limited not to understand what was really happening.
He gave me a regulation powerful handshake, looked at the hybrid. He did not seem to recognize me through the disguise and my new look from the cosmetic surgery in Ursvik. Then I stood chatting with him for a while, waiting for the “ladies”, as he put it. Touched on the obvious topics of conversation, weather, football, gossip. Everything but politics. Somewhere beneath the tense surface of the situation—I could not imagine the extent of it, that I might even get to see my family, for a moment at least, before they were all snatched away from me again—there was still my depth of experience and training. Everything we had done to ready ourselves for a moment like this. For all that could conceivably happen. And more—for the inconceivable.
When Ingrid and Jesús María emerged from the restroom, after an absurdly long time—Jesús María with an intensely red wig, Ingrid with silvery-gray hair and a darker face color, to cover the burn marks from Kleine Brogel—guards appeared from nowhere and asked them to follow along to the security check. The escort and I could only stand and watch. I knew that this was no more than another power move by Edelweiss, that he wanted to demonstrate that at any moment he could crush us like small spiders under his indescribable weight.
Yet my heart was in my mouth when the metal detector gave out a sound. A dull rhythmic buzzing which stabbed through the arrivals hall. Jesús María seemed uncomprehending, waved her arms about in her now exaggerated Irish way, tossing her curly red hair: according to her passport she was now called Scarlett O’Hara.
After some brief theatricals, the mistake was quickly and seamlessly put right and Jesús María was let through, with a cursory body search for the sake of appearances. But I still found it hard to get my pulse back under control. The moment was closing in on me. I had assumed that the entire exchange would take place in separate corridors, hidden passageways, without any of us noticing each other. Amba and the kids set free and Ingrid in custody at last. Me handing her over with the briefcase to Edelweiss—and in return getting his guarantee that they would never harass my family again. At the same time releasing me to the freedom of determining my own fate, deep down under the eternal ice.
But this too would no doubt play out entirely differently from what I could ever have imagined. No-one, except for Edelweiss—and maybe Ingrid herself—could foresee that.
When she approached our escort, whose expression had not altered one iota during the incident at the metal detector, the now much older woman with her silver-gray hair in a topknot shook his hand so strongly that she almost seemed to be making a point. Ingrid probably wanted to show both him and me that she had her strength back. Seemed to have hardly a trace left of either the heavy anesthesia or the incident in Belgium. My plan already felt weak and uncertain. I had an uncomfortable feeling that it was all an elaborate set-up by Edelweiss. That everything in some way revolved around me and not Ingrid. Desmond “Des” Kern, the Core of the Poodle.
After Jesús María had joined us, still gesticulating wildly over the slight to her as an unofficial guest—she too showed herself to be a reasonably good actor—we started moving. Our escort turned off in the direction of the visa line but, without drawing any attention to himself, led us surprisingly smoothly through the enormous mass of passengers who had just landed.
Then we were swallowed up into nothingness. Only the merest pencil-thin line in the wall betrayed where the opening was, before the hidden door closed soundlessly behind us. Once we were past the air lock, everything was silent and sterile, as if someone had switched
off the chaos and the racket out in the arrivals hall. We were now in the sealed wing of the airport, named after John Foster Dulles, of all people. Our Secretary of State during one of the most intense phases of the Cold War, in the middle of the ’50s when the hydrogen bomb went from prototype to usable weapon. And the man behind one of the most important concepts of nuclear war, “massive retaliation”, as well as the systematic deployment of our intercontinental missiles.
We had trained in here so often, simulated questioning which became progressively rougher over time, starting at West Point and continuing to the Team’s most realistic simulations of total terror attack with nuclear weapons. But there had been significant changes since then. The walls seemed thicker than I remembered, the doors half open to the empty interrogation rooms heavily fortified even since our escape three months earlier. Or maybe in preparation for our arrival, the forthcoming exchange. “The Prey” in return for “The Hostage”.
Without a word our escort led us away down the long corridor, past one interview room after the next. I counted the doors in order to keep myself oriented in the otherwise nondescript row: nineteen, twenty, twenty-one . . . Felt the lightness of the hybrid on my shoulders, the whole apparatus swaying in its cradle. Tried not to look down at the optically bewildering wall-to-wall carpet with the pattern of the deconstructed American flag. I already knew where he would stop. Yet I continued to count, as a way of meditating, processing, keying myself up. Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six . . .
At last we arrived at what officially went by the unremarkable name of the “Interview Room”. Only used for our fiercest interrogation training sessions, with or without torture, and real life questioning of suspected global terrorists. Before they were then sent on in due course to Guantanamo or one of our top secret locations around the world.
We ourselves always called it “Fort Knox”—because the walls were said to be at least as thick. It was hermetically sealed, escape-proof, stifling. Even before the improvements.
With a small bow our escort opened the protective doors: I noted that they had acquired yet one more layer since I had last seen them, were now quadruple thick, before he closed them behind us from the outside. Left us alone with the one other person sitting in here. He was even larger than I remembered. More than 6.5 feet tall, at least 290 pounds of muscle, total control of his body when he finally got up to shake our hands with his enormous paw. Just him against the three of us. If we three had still been on the same team.
“Hi there. Welcome to my little den,” John said.
Quickly he went to our packs, took out our liquids, knew exactly where to find them. Literally poured out our whole supply into the drain in the tiled floor. Paid no attention to our weapons, the apparatus inside the hybrid, anything else—and we let him do it. Because in that situation we had no choice at all.
Then John sat down on the bench again, turned in on himself, eyes on the floor and fingertips together. Waited for the surprise which then came.
I had believed Edelweiss capable of a lot. Of most things; essentially everything.
But honestly not this.
5.06
I have read that a spider hears the sound of the prey in its web as tones: that the taut threads function like the strings of a guitar. That the spider can sense what sort of quarry it has caught from the frequency of the signal.
So as we sat locked inside Edelweiss’ lair, the Interview Room, in the spider’s web, he could very well have heard our music on the screens in his office. A soft tone rising to an atonal chaos as our group of visitors was brought in. One after the other, at short intervals, by the same escort that had brought us here to the sealed wing.
I closed my eyes, kept them shut, listened to the abrupt movements in the room, the rustling of clothes, the determined protests. The sounds of Jesús María, Ingrid, me.
And that of my former family.
Slowly I opened my eyes. Glanced hesitantly at Amba, under the cover of my new face. Her heavy make-up did not disguise the deathly pallor. She looked dogged, you could see the wild struggle going on inside her, holding all too few of the keys she needed to unlock the situation. Ever since I had vanished she had probably tried, in her usual way, to “interpret” everything, to get some idea of what might have happened, to make sense of it all, without being able to understand even the first premise. That we never had been that perfect academic couple: she an art historian, a specialist in the detection of fake baroque paintings, I a moral philosopher with a particular focus on the dilemma of nuclear weapons. That I had been living two parallel lives since my first year at university—which was in no way to say that I had not put my heart and soul into them both.
It was a masterly performance on Edelweiss’ part. Directed at me and me alone: a thrust straight into my heart. A sublimely fiendish way of reminding me of the range of his talents. That he would stop at nothing, had mastered all the arts. Of how high the stakes were. In case I might have doubted it, or forgotten.
And this was only the beginning.
Edelweiss’ act of bringing me and my family together now—more than three months after my flight, when things might have been starting to settle—was only his first move. Ripping the wounds open again, the grief, the sense of loss, the stitches. Placing us directly opposite each other to maximize the drama. John with Amba and the children on one side of the room, on the bare bench which ran the length of the wall and had the word INTERVIEWER burned onto it. Myself, Ingrid and Jesús María on the opposite bench, marked INTERVIEWEE, with the hybrid and all our other packs tucked under the bench. And thin mirrors running at eye level from one end of the opposing walls to the other.
It had been in here, during the West Point advanced course, that Edelweiss for the first time used his expression “the Theater of the Body”. Said that it was this and this alone which unfolded in the mirror facing the interviewee’s bench. And that they just could not help watching themselves, hastening their breakdown.
I continued to observe Amba, since I could not bring myself to look at the kids—and since for a long time she hardly seemed to notice my eyes on her. She was formally dressed, as if going to a party, with yet another newly bought sari, bright red, the sparkling end of the cloth draped over her head. She could easily have come straight from some event, or maybe just the Friday gathering of our neighbors in the academics’ housing complex where Volvos from the 1990s stood sloppily parked in front of the hawthorn hedges trimmed without care.
Her clothes nevertheless gave me some comfort, if one could talk at all of comfort in this situation. The sari did not look like prison clothing at least. Although Edelweiss could have dressed his pawns in whatever costumes he chose.
It was clear that her thoughts were racing. Soon she too, without ever letting the children out of her sight, watching closely for the slightest reaction beyond their strange calm—the apathy of deadly fear—looked back at us as we sat along the opposite bench. Our anonymous little delegation.
A very short woman with the red hair of the Irish and a pleated skirt. A tall woman with gray hair and a certain likeness to Greta Garbo. A super-fit man with a big blond beard.
I assumed that Amba probably saw us much as was intended: as criminals of sorts, perhaps spies, maybe even terrorists, with no connection to herself and the children other than that we had now been bundled together in the same room. That she hardly knew who was going to question or be questioned. She would get no further than that now, with so many unknowns. Not even she.
That woman who would otherwise always cut through layer after layer, find the exact deviation from standard pattern in art forgeries, seemed able to uncover everything except my own double life. Whose default setting was bloody-mindedness, especially in her dealings with authorities. Who loved to contest everything, from her perpetual parking tickets to the proposed construction of an activity center at the old playground, which was of some cultural-historical interest. And who had been the one to push fo
r our children’s names.
“Unity” was our first, little more than nine months after we had first met at the welcome party for new teachers at my small Catholic university. Amba was not a member of staff and came along as somebody else’s guest—otherwise the absurd logistics of what I was trying to do would have been impossible: the lies, the excuses, the invented study trips or conferences requiring nights away. Instead, immediately after her exams, she got a job as a forgery expert at the American office of Christies. With Amba’s obvious lack of interest in “talking shop”—because according to her there were so many more important things to talk about—she was also able to accept rapid changes to our plans, without delving too deeply into why. My sudden need at puzzlingly short notice to head out and fetch or drop off something. So long as in return I would cover reasonably often for the unexpected changes in her own schedule. Because some old friend had got in touch, or just her constant overtime at the auction house.
After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, my double life began to be less demanding, since we were no longer involved in what was referred to as “direct warfare”. Instead it became increasingly indirect with each passing year. The state visits shorter, sometimes barely twenty-four hours, in this digital age when our physical presence was no longer such a priority. Edelweiss’ extravagant maneuvers often took place during one single long day, in which the world could just as well succumb to nuclear weapons attacks as be saved at the last moment.
On coming home from those simulations I had thrown myself straight into bed, unable to relate to the real—or unreal—world, had hardly the strength to kiss the children goodnight. For Amba’s benefit I blamed the fact that the students’ constant moral-philosophical paradoxes during our evening seminars had taken it out of me. How they just loved to twist and turn everything, always challenging their poor teacher. In fact I had never had any students. But I knew that Amba would not check that: that she reserved her suspicion, her well-known ability to see through almost everything, for her professional life.
